“The unit is breaking up” said former rig worker on April 20

A call on April 20 pulled UC Berkeley engineering professor Robert Bea into the thick of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill disaster.

That night, Bea, co-founder of the university’s Center for Risk Mitigation, got a call from an alarmed former oil rig worker in Louisiana, reporting on BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig, 50 miles off the coast.